I'd recommend the George RR Martin books (Song of Ice and Fire) to anyone who liked The Wheel of Time before it started sucking. But Martin writes even slower than Jordan, I think. Been waiting on his 4th book for over a year.

The Briar King was pretty good too, and the second one's coming out next month. Kind of Shannara-ish, and it's like an alternative-Earth fantasy type of thing.

Now updated with links to some of the better titles. All of those are available for free, no registration required. I also linked to Cory Doctorow's website which has some of his stories, though I don't feel like digging through his terrible interface to find them right now.

I can't really recommend Stephen Wolfram's book, although if you know who he is you may want to read it anyway. He tries to make the case that the reductionist view of science started by Newton and brought to its height by Einstein wherein complex behavior is reduced to an analytical equation is a false path and that most of the world is better described by a model more computational in nature. Apparently, he spent ten years fooling around with finite state machines to come to that conclusion, and lets you know about it blow-by-sorry-blow.

not really electronically, but when I was staying at the hotel bored, I bought a few books to read, and if anyone has thought about reading The Sword of Truth series by Terry Goodkind, dont. I liked the 1st few books, standard fantasy fare with many ideas seemingly ripped straight from Robert Jordan, but the last few books I read seemed to follow this inane pattern: pg 1-100 reminind the reader of all the same things and character traits of each character. pg 101-700 Introduce a new twist/enemy/magic and have absolutely nothing happen. pg 701-725 Finish the twist/enemy/magic in a uber rushed manner.

It takes 43 muscles to frown and 17 to smile, but it doesn't take any to just sit there with a dumb look on your face.

lol, I have teh same opinion. The next 2 books suck just as much. It was just annoying that suddenly, a whole new group of people showed up that was given such importance/dread that you would think they would have at least been mentioned in say, the book before... or maybe even the book after. but nope.

It takes 43 muscles to frown and 17 to smile, but it doesn't take any to just sit there with a dumb look on your face.